Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 1)

Silverlight is a rapid-evolving technology. Over a time span of 3 years, it has evolved from being a JavaScript-based platform to a full .NET implementation. With 4 versions released and version 5 in the pipeline at the time of writing, Silverlight has more versions than .NET! That makes it hard for book writers such as me to keep up with new features being added.

It seems to me that it’s also difficult to create and manage exams about Silverlight. For the previous versions of Silverlight, there weren’t any exams available. Silverlight 4 is the first version of which an exam is being created. It was possible to take the beta-exam late 2010; the exam will be officially open in Q1 2011. More information about the exam can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Exam.aspx?ID=70-506&Locale=en-us

With this guide, I aim to make the preparation for the exam a bit easier.

Goal and approach to getting ready
At this point, there’s no official courseware available to study for the exam. In any case, you should therefore be familiar already with Silverlight development. Reading some books on Silverlight will help as well. The list below contains some links to books available for Silverlight 4:

• Silverlight 4 Unleashed
• Silverlight 4 In Action
• Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook
• Pro Business Application with Silverlight 4

On top of that, reading articles and blog posts will help you in passing the exam. In this article series, I try to create an extensive list of links along with some explanation on the topic at hand that contain the information you need to know. To structure this, we’ll follow the list of topics described by Microsoft on the exam outline page (http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Exam.aspx?ID=70-506&Locale=en-us#tab2):

• Laying Out a User Interface (15%)
• Enhancing the User Interface (14%)
• Implementing Application Logic (16%)
• Working with Data (17%)
• Interacting with a Host Platform (11%)
• Structuring Applications (13%)
• Deploying Applications (13%)

(Small note: the outlined percentages total 99%, so you’ll probably get 1% for entering your name!)

In this first part we’ll look at “Laying Out a User Interface”.

Part 1: Laying Out a User Interface
Arrange content with panels
Layout is a very important aspect in Silverlight. Since Silverlight is an RIA, applications we build with it are intended to run on different screen resolutions. A well-built application should look fine on all these resolutions as well. Luckily, Silverlight has inherited layout panels from WPF, including the Canvas, the Grid and the StackPanel. Via the Silverlight Toolkit, other panels including the DockPanel and the WrapPanel were added. It’s my opinion that the Grid is the most used panel for (business) applications, as it can help lining out content, while a Canvas will be more used for example when creating a game with moving parts or a “hand-drawn” custom control such as a gauge control. The Canvas support z-indexing as well, allowing sending its children up or down in the stack.

When looking at the outline, the following articles are helpful:

• Layout in general:

Layout controls help building the user interface of Silverlight applications. The class hierarchy for the most important layout controls is as follows:

System.Object 

--System.Windows.DependencyObject 

----System.Windows.UIElement 

------System.Windows.FrameworkElement 

-------- System.Windows.Controls.Viewbox 

--------System.Windows.Controls.Border 

--------System.Windows.Controls.Panel 

----------System.Windows.Controls.Grid 

----------System.Windows.Controls.StackPanel 

----------System.Windows.Controls.Canvas 

--------System.Windows.Controls.Control 

----------System.Windows.Controls.ContentControl 

------------System.Windows.Controls.ScrollViewer

Read more: Silverlight Show

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